A Cold Day in Paradise
Read A Cold Day in Paradise Online
Authors: Steve Hamilton
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MINOTAUR
MYSTERIES
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BLOOD IS ALWAYS THE SAME.I tried not to think. It didn’t happen, it was a bad dream.
Uttley thanking me. Telling me to go home and get some sleep. Edwin standing there with that lost look on his face. For once all the money in the world wasn’t going to make a problem go away. Chief Maven, playing his little hard-ass games with us. I had known so many cops just like him.
Way back when, Alex. Back in Detroit.
Stop right there. Don’t think about anything else. You didn’t really go into that motel room. You didn’t really see it. The red, the red, all that red.
I tried to stop the next image from coming into my mind, but I could not. I saw the blood again. A vast shivering red lake of blood.
That day in Detroit. I am there again. The blood, just like tonight. The same color. The same quality. Blood is always the same.
“Hamilton combines crisp, clear writing, wily, colorful characters and an offbeat locale in an impressive debut.”
—
Publishers Weekly“A good combination of crafty and colorful chaeracters, an offbeat locale in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and really crisp, clear writing … There are several plots, all woven together very well. Alex is a very likable character, as are other townspeople, and the writing moves very swiftly, making this an easy and enjoyable book to read.”
—
Sullivan County Democrat“P.I. Alex McNight’s ‘mean steets’ are the deep pine woods and the small lakeside towns of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and here the past comes to find him, chilling as the November wind. A must for PI and suspense fans.”
—Charles Todd, author of
Wings of Fire
ST. MARTIN’S/MINOTAUR PAPERBACKS TITLES
by STEVE HAMILTONIce Run
Blood is the Sky
North of Nowhere
The Hunting Wind
Winter of the Wolf Moon
A Cold Day in Paradise
A COLD
DAY IN
PARADISE
STEVE HAMILTON
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
NOTE:
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
A COLD DAY IN PARADISE
Copyright © 1998 by Steve Hamilton.
Excerpt from
Winter of the Wolf Moon
copyright © 1999 by Steve Hamilton.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-19399
ISBN: 0-312-96919-8
EAN: 978-0-312-96919-6
Printed in the United States of America
St Martin’s Press hardcover edition / September 1998
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / February 2000
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
15 14 13 12
TO JULIA AND NICHOLAS
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTSI’d like to thank the people of Chippewa County, Michigan, for their hospitality, and for their patience with downstaters like me. To anyone who hasn’t been there, if you ever find yourself driving from Sault Ste. Marie to Paradise, don’t worry about getting your car stuck in the snow. That’s not to say it won’t happen. If it’s between November and March, it probably
will
happen. But the first person to come by will help you. You can bet on it, because that’s the kind of people who live there. So if any local characters in this book behave less than honorably, please believe that they’re nothing more than a product of my overactive imagination.Thanks, also, to my writing group—Bill Keller, Frank Hayes, Vernece Seager, Douglas Smyth, Kevin McEneaney, and Laura Fontaine. Without you I’d still be promising myself that I’d start writing again some day. Thanks to Liz Staples and Taylor Brugman for your time and local knowledge. To Chuck Sumner and Alfred Schwab for your encouragement. To Ruthe Furie, Bob Randisi, and Jan Grape from the Private Eye Writers of America. To the incomparable Ruth Cavin, Marika Rohn, and everyone else at St. Martin’s Press.
For technical assistance, I need to thank Cheryl Wheeler from the Private Security and Investigative Section of the Michigan State Police; Larry Queipo, former Police Chief, Town of Kingston, New York; and Dr. Glenn Hamilton from the Department of Emergency Medicine at Wright State University.
And most of all, thank you, Julia, my wife and best friend. And Nickie—you are my perfect little boy, and always will be.
HAPTER
O
NE
T
HERE IS A
bullet in my chest, less than a centimeter from my heart. I don’t think about it much anymore. It’s just a part of me now. But every once in a while, on a certain kind of night, I remember that bullet. I can feel the weight of it inside me. I can feel its metallic hardness. And even though that bullet has been warming inside my body for fourteen years, on a night like this when it is dark enough and the wind is blowing, that bullet feels as cold as the night itself.
It was a Halloween night, which always makes me think about my days on the force. There’s nothing like being a policeman in Detroit on Halloween night. The kids wear masks, but instead of trick-or-treating they burn down houses. The next day there might be forty or fifty houses reduced to black skeletons, still smoking. Every cop is out on the streets, looking for kids with gasoline cans and calling in the fires before they rage out of control. The only thing worse than being a Detroit policeman on Halloween night is being a Detroit fireman.
But that was a long time ago. Fourteen years since I took that bullet, fourteen years and a good three hundred miles away, due south. It might as well have been on another planet, in another lifetime.
Paradise, Michigan, is a little town in the Upper Peninsula, on the shores of Lake Superior, across Whitefish Bay from Sault Ste. Marie, or “the Soo,” as the locals
call it. On a Halloween night in Paradise, you might see a few paper ghosts in the trees, whipped by the wind off the lake. Or you might see a car filled with costumed children on their way to a party, witches and pirates looking out the back window at you as you wait at the one blinking red light in the center of town. Maybe Jackie will be standing behind the bar wearing his gorilla mask when you step into the place. The running joke is that you wait until he takes the mask off to scream.
Aside from that, a Halloween night doesn’t look much different from any other October night in Paradise. It’s mostly just pine trees, and clouds, and the first hint of snow in the air. And the largest, coldest, deepest lake in the world, waiting to turn into a November monster.
I pulled the truck into the Glasgow Inn parking lot. All the regulars would already be there. It was poker night. I was a good two hours late, so I was sure they had started without me. I had spent the entire evening in a trailer park over in Rosedale, knocking on doors. A local contractor had been setting a new mobile home when it tipped over and crushed the legs of one of the workers. He wasn’t in the hospital more than an hour before Mr. Lane Uttley, Esquire, was at his side, offering the best legal services that a fifty-percent cut could buy. It would probably be a quick out of court settlement, he told me on the phone, but it was always nice to have a witness just in case they try to beat the suit. Somebody to testify that no, the guy wasn’t stone drunk and he wasn’t showing off by trying to balance five tons of mobile home on his nose.